Spotify launched a new info site designed to communicate to artists. Primarily the site is about Spotify and its attempts to contribute to the music industry. As such it is couched in some fairly insider language and terms, but if you follow my site or any other people who write about the music industry it is very accessible. It is fascination because Spotify's basic argument is that they are attempting to rectify the problem in declining revenues for artists. It is a bit more open and straightforward than Pandora, but still a bit sketchy on the actual numbers. To be perfectly fair to Spotify and Pandora this is not entirely all their fault as different labels and producers have different contracts with their artists. it is a lot like the book industry where a mainstream best selling artist gets a "good" contract at 20% of profits, but a entry level author would be lucky to get 10%.

The most interesting factoid is that Spotify has paid out over a billion dollars in revenue to date, about half of which was paid in 2013. This indicates a rapid growth chart, but the question is whether or not this model will work long term? In many ways I think it reflects the old "radio play" model. Big acts with bigger name recognition get most of that money and the talented artists with less recognition are making pennies. This becomes obvious if you read down towards the bottom of their page explaining the payment structure where Spotify explains their average per stream payout as between ".006 and .0084" cents per stream. That is right, the artist makes almost nothing for a single play- in theory.

Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen. There are a lot of variables and historical context usually missing in these arguments. it also depends on your perspective and goal for the Arts in general.

What is good is that Spotify is directly engaging with the core question head on. This is probably due to the fact that many artists are already beginning to replicate the Netflix effect and pull their content out of Spotify. I will write more on this in a later post, but for now have fun browsing:http://www.spotifyartists.com/